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Scott Phillips receives Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow Award

February 21, 2012

Scott Phillips receives Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow Award

Scott Phillips, an assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State and holder of the Martarano Career Development Professorship, has been honored with an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow award in recognition of his research accomplishments. Sloan Research Fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in seven fields of science: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.

Phillips focuses his research on organic and environmental chemistry, the design and synthesis of molecules with unique functions, analytical and bioanalytical chemistry, and materials chemistry. In one project, Phillips is developing materials that respond to external signals by changing shape, function, and/or surface properties. Phillips also is working on a project in which he uses organic chemistry to create diagnostic devices that provide all the functions typically obtained with laboratory instruments, but that use only organic reactions. These systems may be useful in applications that require portable and inexpensive devices for detecting disease or pollution; for example, in the developing world and in hospital emergency rooms. A second program in this area focuses on reaction networks that are self-perpetuating, the simplest of which is an autocatalytic reaction, in which a molecule makes more of itself. Phillips plans to expand autocatalytic behavior into more complex reaction networks, with a goal of developing systems that provide useful functions and byproducts.

Phillips's previous awards include a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2012, a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, which he received in 2010 and 2011, and a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award from the United States Department of Defense in 2010. In that same year, he won an Outstanding Professor in Chemistry award from the honor society Alpha Chi Sigma. In 2009, Phillips won a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award and a research award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In that same year, he also won a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Thieme Chemistry Journal Award, and a Penn State Eberly College of Science Dean's Climate and Diversity Award. In 2008, he won a New Faculty Award from The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

Prior to joining the Penn State faculty in 2008, Phillips worked from 2004 to 2008 as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where he developed new materials and detection platforms for use in drug development. He also synthesized chemical compounds with anticancer properties from marine organisms. Phillips earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the California State University in San Bernardino in 1999.